Sunday, April 20, 2014

Towards a Theory of Pseudo-Isidore: Addendum on the Priority of the Hispana

Teaching and other sundry chores generally force my
blog into hibernation during the school year. But I’m turning on the lights for
just a moment to make a quick point about the Hispana and its relationship to the A2 recension of Pseudo-Isidore.

When Zechiel-Eckes discovered three manuscripts that had
been used by the Pseudo-Isidorian excerptores, he also discovered that, in at
least one place, A2 followed the (clearly original) readings of one of these source
manuscripts more closely than any of the other early recensions. In his later
work, Zechiel-Eckes expanded his case for A2 priority, ultimately claiming that
A2 represented the earliest product of the forgers. On this blog and in my other work, however, I
have repeatedly characterized the Hispana
as the most fundamental Pseudo-Isidorian product.

This difference of opinion exists for a great many reasons.
Among these reasons are differing views on the scope and contemporary
significance of Pseudo-Isidore’s anti-chorbishop polemic—something readers of
this blog have already had a taste of, and something they’ll have to wade
through a lot more of, as soon as the school year ends. The chorepiscopate is
a rare arena wherein Pseudo-Isidore engages the opinion of his
contemporaries directly, and will therefore come to interest us enormously.

But I want to set all that aside right now, and present some
haphazard philological evidence that inauthentic Hispana interpolations predate A2. What follows is not the result
of any systematic investigation (which I don’t have time for at the moment),
but rather a few points resurrected from my notes. In other words: This should
by no means be read as the extent of the evidence for Hispana priority. Nevertheless, it is strong evidence that the Hispana
interpolator worked before A2 was compiled.

In a previous post, I enumerated and described the fourteen especially clear instances of inauthentic interpolation in the Hispana uncovered by Maassen. In discussing
these passages, we noted that the interpolator’s interests seemed orthogonal to the interests of the decretal forgers. Of the fourteen passages at issue, eleven do not recur in the decretal forgeries at all. That is to say, the Hispana interpolators revised these passages, but the decretal forgers never bothered to cite them. Only c. 13 of Arles I, c. 11 of
Toledo VI and Innocent's letter to Victricius of Rouen attracted the attention
of both the decretal forger and the Hispana interpolator. Of these three highly interesting texts, c. 11 of Toledo VI
cannot help us decide questions of priority: The decretal forgers use only the title of this canon, and the
interpolator removed a clause from the main text. Only c. 13 of Arles I and Innocent’s decretal are dispositive.

In every instance that A2 decretals cite the relevant passages from Arles I and Innocent, they attest to Hispana
interpolations. As far as I have been
able to tell, the decretals never incorporate the original, uninterpolated, Gallican versions of these passages. Either their allusions are too loose to permit a determination, or they are close enough to reveal dependence upon the interpolated Hispana.

We begin with Arles I. I highlight the Pseudo-Isidorian
modifications of c. 13:

All the Pseudo-Isidore manuscripts that Schon has taken into account, including the A2 representatives, attest to each of these Hispana interpolations . Maassen notes that the first two Hispana revisions to Arles I (“...ecclesiasticam regulam...” and
“...ad accusationem...”) recur in other, non-Hispana recensions of Arles I. Yet the
requirement to prove (via the acta
publica) that one is above all suspicion ("... omni se carere suspicione...") comes from the Hispana interpolator alone. The interpolated canon also recurs in Benedictus Levita, at 1.401.

We move on to Innocent’s decretal to Victricius, JK 286. The
third chapter, with Hispana revisions
in bold, reads as follows:

Maassen was particularly intrigued by the fact that the
clericos/laicos interpolation did not exactly correspond with the enhanced Hispana text. In fact, though all
Pseudo-Isidorian versions of this passage attempt to insert a reference to the
laity where the original decretal discusses only clerici, they all do so in slightly different ways, as if a graphically
confusing interlinear addition gave rise to several diverse
interpretations (all of which, however, have identical force). Isidorus
Mercator’s citation, of course, also picks up the tell-tale “placuit” and
“omnibus” retouchings: This is a clear citation from the interpolated Hispana.

The A2 recension includes Isidorus Mercator’s preface, and as was the case with Arles I, all the manuscripts Schon collated attest to these readings. You might object, however, that Isidore's preface does not, strictly speaking,
belong at the head of A2. The preface describes the full, three-part Pseudo-Isidorian collection, but in A2 only the decretals from Part I and the start of Part III follow. The preface could be a later accretion to A2; I have, myself, raised this possibility
in print. It is therefore fortunate to have Ps.-Marcellus, JK +160, from the
body of A2, to confirm the anteriority of the Innocent interpolations:

Once again, all the codices Schon has collated, including all A2 representatives, confirm the presence of the bolded Hispana interpolations.

A fuller investigation is necessary to establish whether and to
what extent the decretal forgeries also attest to the benign revisions and
corrections that constitute the majority of the Pseudo-Isidorian activity at
the level of the Hispana. But this
much is undeniable: In those rare instances where the decretals in A2
incorporate Hispana passages that
have been supplied with inauthentic content by the Hispana interpolator,
they always attest to the Hispana interpolations.

Brief remarks on what I think that means, and what I think it does not mean:

1) The Hispana was manifestly not interpolated to facilitate work on the decretal forgeries. As we have seen, the vast majority of the revised passages are never used by the decretal forger at all. The interpolator's views are not necessarily at odds with ideas advanced in the decretal forgeries, but his opinions are less extreme and embrace a broader variety of issues, as we will see as soon as the summer finally, finally arrives.

2) Revisionary work on the Hispana began before work on the decretals of A2. Key passages had already been interpolated when the decretal forgers set to work. As far as I have been able to tell (but prove me wrong!), the decretal forgers used only the interpolated versions of these passages. In many cases, particularly with the Innocent decretal, their allusions are too loose to permit textual conclusions. But whenever they get close enough for us to tell, it turns out that the interpolated recension is the source. The clericos/laicos variants might even suggest that our decretal forgers worked from a manuscript wherein some of these interpolations existed as interlinear or marginal additions—the interpolators' working copy.

3) Future posts in this series will discuss an issue I have
so far studiously avoided (for reasons that will become clear): Our sole
complete witness to the interpolated Hispana,
Vat. lat. 1341 (V1341), carries two decretal forgeries in the name of Damasus (text available here and here). One of these also recurs in A2 (see Schon's text); the other is taken up only in A1 and A/B (again, Schon's text). I am not at all
convinced that the priority of the Hispana
interpolations can be used to assert the priority of either of these Damasus forgeries, solely on the grounds that interpolations and forgeries reside alongside one another in V1341. We need to distinguish clearly between the interpolated Hispana, which was once available in as many as seven medieval manuscripts, and which was expanded with many decretal forgeries to yield the full three-part collection of Isidorus Mercator; and V1341, which is but one mid-century, possibly idiosyncratic witness to this complex text. We must be open to the possibility that the two decretal
forgeries in Damasus’s name were added to V1341well after the Hispana had been revised and interpolated (but before the specific sub-version in V1341 had come to be blended with the other decretal forgeries). The arguments that these two Damasus forgeries advance are markedly different—markedly
more extreme and much more focused on the problem of episcopal accusations—than the views of whomever was responsible for revising the Hispana.

About Me

I'm Eric Knibbs, Assistant Professor of History at Williams College in Williamstown, MA.

I work on the Pseudo-Isidorian Forgeries.

New readers unfamiliar with our pseudonymous friend, one of the most prolific and successful forgers in all of Western history, might want to start with the introductory posts (one, two, three, four, five; now supplemented).

Once you get through that, you might somehow find yourself wondering what I think. In that case, I invite you to explore my lengthy (and supposedly ongoing) Theory of Pseudo-Isidore series: